"ANY machine you purchase WILL clean your dishes just fine if it's installed correctly, working as it should, and proper cleaning product and dosage used. Even cheap ones. Put it in the bank. If it doesn't, you're missing something." I am going to mildly disagree with asolo on one point, and that is the "ANY machine" part. My wife and I travel around to different parts of the state routinely. Our last stint was up in Fresno and we rented an apartment there equipped with a GE Hotpoint dishwasher. The performance of the machine was pretty sketchy. While it did okay on plates and glasses and so forth, it could not remove baked-on encrustations from our ovenware anything like our Bosch at home. I chalked it up to its being a loud, el-cheapo POS and thought no more of it. So now we are lodging at my sister's palatial digs on a contract near her home. Well, she has a 2006 or so vintage GE Profile and I am seeing the same lousy performance. The machine is very quiet, unlike the box we left behind in Fresno, but when it comes to cleaning performance it is the Hotpoint's twin. it will not remove any sort of baked-on deposits. French Onion Soup leaves the bottoms and sides of her Le Crueset festooned with a latticework of carbonized onion evocative of a Jackson Pollock print: after washing it in my sister's dog dishwasher. I have examined the spray arms and all inspect-able piping and galleries inside the machine looking for obstructions. It is not a temperature problem, the thing gets plenty hot. But I have a theory about it which I will illustrate for you by way of pictures. Take a look at the bottom spray arm of this machine. It looks nice and big, right? It's plastic, but so is the spray arm in our Bosch. No big deal, it seems pretty heavy duty. But now look at the underside of that same spray arm I have removed from the machine: Notice the water channel? It is simply a molded plastic gallery and it is incredibly small. Here is a closer look: The gallery is maybe an inch wide, at best, and it has two ports exhausting water out the BOTTOM of the arm! This is the highest pressure available in a tiny "pipe" and it is being used to bounce off the bottom of the machine. The metal shields you see are not forming part of the channel, they are simply heat shields designed to protect the undersides of the wash arm from the heating element. Dishwashers work because they pump lots of hot water onto your dishes at high pressure. I simply do not think that the volume of water this arm can deliver is adequate. The underside of the middle rack arm is the same story. It looks big from the top, but underneath it's just a tiny molded gallery, too. I did not remove it from the machine because it is a pain to get out, but here is a picture of the underside of that: It looks big from the top and dinky underneath. Just to get an idea how much water that lower spray arm can hold at one time, I taped up all the spray ports, tipped it over and filled it with water. I then dumped it into a measuring cup and got less than 3/4 of one cup. If GE got rid of that fake flange affair that makes the spray arm look big from the top, and actually installed the tiny little wash arm that lower spray gallery really equals, nobody would buy the machine. In my opinion, GE is trying to engineer their water-savings claims by using lower capacity pumps and cheesy, deceptively-molded spray arms to sneak inferior machines past consumers while making them pay high prices for supposedly upmarket gear. Yes, the stainless tub is nice on the thing, but I just don't think it's got it where it counts. In any case, my small-water-volume observations are still theory at this point. There could be something wrong inside the pump, which I haven't disassembled yet. But I look at the hot water flow inside the dishwasher sort of the same way I would view it from a circuit analysis standpoint: You need current to do the work. You combine high pressure with lots of flow in order to have lots and lots of hot water molecules striking the remnants of last night's tub of lasagna. If there is a design feature that restricts a robust flow then I cannot see how it will not impair performance. So personally, unless someone can point out something I am missing here, I am thinking don't buy a GE dishwasher.

oregpsnow said: You are certainly free to buy whatever you want. I am putting the money I don't spend on Persil into my retirement account. LOL! Believe it or not, I was a big proponent of Tide HE over Persil a few years ago. I even said the exact same thing you did - that people are crazy for spending so much on a detergent when they should be saving that money and putting into their IRA or 401(k)s. How well are all of our retirement accounts doing today, those of us who have anything left in them? I switched to Persil due to the fact that it cleans as well or better than Tide HE, the de facto leading domestic detergent, but doesn't cause skin irritation. My partner developed a sensitivity to Tide, and nothing else that I tried comes close to cleaning as well except for Persil. Bi-O-Kleen Premium does a good job, but it also lacks certain ingredients that prevent corrosion. I don't know if that's a big deal or not, so I'm proceeding cautiously in this regard. I don't want to use something that is not going to properly protect the metal parts of my washer, but then I don't even know if that's an issue at all. I had a choice of using a more sensitive detergent that didn't clean as well but also did not cause irritation, or using Persil which gave me the best of all worlds but at a higher cost. I chose the latter because I want clean clothes without itching. Persil Universal Megaperls contains five different enzymes to assist with stain removal, which I believe is more than most domestic products. Here is list comparing ingredients from Persil and Tide HE: Tide HE: Sodium Aluminosilicate Sodium Sulfate Sodium Carbonate Linear Alkylbenzene Sulfonate Water Nonanoyloxybenzenesulfonate Alkyl Sulfate Sodium Percarbonate Sodium Polyacrylate Polyethylene Glycol 4000 Fragrance Diethylenetriamine Pentaacetate (Sodium Salt) Disodium Diaminostilbene Disulfonate Palmitic Acid Protease Silicone Modified Starch ÃÂ Persil Megaperls: ZEOLITE SODIUM CARBONATE PEROXIDE SODIUM DODECYLBENZENESULFONATE TAED AQUA (WATER) SODIUM LAURYL SULFATE SODIUM CARBONATE SODIUM SULFATE SODIUM CITRATE 2-PROPYLHEPTAN-1-OL, 7EO SODIUM ACRYLIC ACID/MA COPOLYMER SULFONATED POLYETHYLENE TEREPHTHALATE CELLULOSE GUM PEG-80 ZEA MAYS (CORN) STARCH ALCOHOLS, C16-18, 7EO TETRASODIUM ETIDRONATE SODIUM SOAP C16-18 SODIUM BICARBONATE PERFUME CORN FLOUR HEPTASODIUM DTPMP PARAFFIN SODIUM CHLORIDE C12-18 FATTY ALCOHOL 5 EO SODIUM HYDROXIDE OPTICAL BRIGHTNER SODIUM GLYCOLATE PEG-14M COLORANT HYDRATED SILICA PROTEASE HEXYL CINNAMAL LINALOOL BENZYL SALICYLATE LIPASE AMYLASE MANNANASE CELLULASE

Redsun The deer did not touch the Rattlesnake beans on the same trellis last year or the year before or anything else in my garden beds last year for that matter. I think the sweet corn I planted in a new 1000 sq/ft bed drew the deer into the area and the newly born fawns were willing to try anything. They also ate most of the leaves from the cucumbers on the trellis next to the beans. A deer proof fence to surround all of my garden beds would need to be about 50' x 120'. Please do tell me how I can do that cheaply Redsun.

Some of the problems with cold water people out there in the world is they see stains disappear using cool or tempered cold..many stains will be shifted..so they think Great cold water really does clean my clothes. I don't think many in the world give a thought to body oils. Weve had people come in here asking why their sheets and pillowcases have turned yellow, remember the person that was going out to buy multi colored sheets in order to hide the yellow? As for smell, a fox may smell his own hole first but humans don't, check out the laundramats those people throw handfuls of dryer sheets in the dryer and dump the FS in the washer, WHY, they want their clothes to smell clean..there's two reasons for this either they associate perfumed clothing to clean, which many do, including some people here, or they are covering something up..I think much of the time its both. cold water will not clean your textiles, just because it removed a stain does not mean the clothes are clean. Body oils come out easily in hot water but if washed in cold will build up in the fibers turning to wax...melt a candle on a garment than wash ut in cold..wash it in hot and you begin to see it melt..you all know this but someone new may not. Our mothers and grandmothers did not wash in cold, they knew more than many people out there that was a poor laundry practice....there are a lot of people, intelligent people that someone has convinced use a coldwater detergent and your clothes will be clean and your saving energy....and on top of it there's no mention of how they are damaging their machines. No I don't wash in cold or even cool, I don't care what someone else does..I value clean clothes. You had to get me started on cold water..lol